Senior Lecturer, Politics and Public Policy, Flinders University
Scott Morrison remains an intriguing, and polarising, figure on the Liberal Party front-bench. Morrison has been described as relentless, ambitious, and hard-line, although these labels only give us some clues to his personal politics, and ultimately his political agenda.
Morrison entered parliament in 2007. He has both witnessed close-up the leadership instability in the country and been an active participant in it.
Within a year of winning the seat of Cook in Sydney’s south-eastern suburbs, Morrison was quickly promoted to the shadow ministry by Malcolm Turnbull. In 2013, this time under Tony Abbott’s leadership, Morrison became immigration minister before being handed the social services portfolio in 2014.
Since then, under Turnbull, Morrison has handed down three federal budgets.
Scott Morrison (left) and Malcolm Turnbull speaking in parliament earlier this year.AAP/Dean Lewins
What then of Morrison’s politics?
In part, Morrison’s conservative politics are informed by his faith – he has been a long-standing member of the Pentecostal church. Generally speaking, Morrison is economically liberal and socially conservative. He was just one of ten Liberal MPs, alongside Abbott and Barnaby Joyce, to abstain from the same-sex marriage vote.
Moreover, he signalled a clear willingness to ensure greater religious freedoms during this debate.
Yet, Morrison’s faith plays a secondary role to his political antenna. As he once argued, “The Bible is not a policy handbook, and I get very worried when people try to treat it like one”.
This conservative politics, especially on social policy, might likely appeal to the right- and far-right wing of the party (and parts of the wider electorate).
Morrison was a particularly strident and truculent immigration minister. He was notably forced to backtrack on his “insensitive” comments about questioning the funeral costs after the deaths of up to 50 refugees off Christmas Island in 2010.
His voting record solidly fits the pattern of economically liberal and socially conservative. Morrison has consistently voted against tobacco plain packaging, a price on carbon, and increasing Aboriginal land rights. Morrison has also supported other key conservative flagship issues, such as decreasing funding to the SBS and the ABC.
Morrison attending an NBN press conference in Sydney this year.AAP/Daniel Munoz
Morrison can be conservative and hard line. But he is arguably far more flexible than, say, Peter Dutton or Tony Abbott.
As social services minister, it is striking that Morrison did some work to soften the infamous 2014 Hockey Budget. What caught some off-guard was a willingness to work with those in the community services sector around superannuation reform. As Nick Bryant, author of The Rise and Fall of Australia, notes of Morrison, he refused to be “typecast”.
If Morrison is conservative on much social policy, then he remains far more wedded to a neo-liberal economic agenda. As political scientist Carol Johnson has noted, the Liberals have had ongoing troubles in selling a neo-liberal agenda to the public.
Morrison’s two budgets as treasurer give a strong indication of his neo-liberal proclivities. What is most striking has been the determined and strident effort to dismantle Australia’s long-standing progressive income tax system.
Morrison speaking at the 60th Federal Council of the Liberal Party.AAP/Joel Carrett
If Morrison gets his way, then the third part of his ambitious tax plan will see the middle income tax bracket totally removed by 2024. To date, there had been bi-partisan support (albeit tepid in some quarters) for the centre-piece of Australia’s so-called “fair go” principle. Morrison’s tax reform would radically remake Australia’s economy and politics.
On other measures, Morrison remains wedded to a small-state, low-tax agenda, even if his proposed corporate tax cuts do not materialise. He is also the latest in a long line of treasurers refusing to increase the welfare safety net, leaving Newstart untouched for 20 years.
Yet, Morrison’s first budget also reminds us that, despite promoting a neo-liberal agenda, he can be flexible within this over-arching setting. His 2017 budget contained the major levy on banks – a remarkable manoeuvre from a centre-right politician, done in part in a failed effort to stave off the Royal Commission.
Morrison leaving a meeting with Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe earlier this year.AAP/Dan Himbrechts
In his efforts to de-toxify the Liberals from Hockey’s 2014 budget, Morrison also moved at the 2017 budget, counter to his instincts, to raise the Medicare levy to safeguard NDIS spending.
Even in the 2018 budget, Morrison pledged to spend a striking AU$1.6bn for the aged-care sector. Cynically, this might be to shore up support from a key part of the liberal support base, but again, this shows some flexibility for state action, rather than just a purely reductivist, small-state agenda.
Morrison then is a conservative, and an economic liberal, working away within neo-liberal settings. But he is not an inflexible or unreflexive one. He apparently thought he could win the case to increase the GST with the Australian public.
His manoeuvrings in the lead-up the current leadership crisis also show a deft hand at balancing politics with his own ambition. In this regard, he might well emulate the past master of this brand of politics, who left parliament at exactly the same moment he entered it – John Howard.
“Clouds” in all their forms are, of course, presented to us as facilitators of our freedom. After all, they make it possible for me to sit in front of my PC and freely surf with everything out there at our disposal – or so it seems on the surface.
by Slavoj Žižek-
( August 24, 2018, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) When WikiLeaks exploded onto the scene a decade ago, it briefly seemed like the internet could create a truly open society. Since then, Big Brother has fought back.
Every day now, we hear complaints about the growing control of digital media, often from people who apparently believe the concept was originally an unregulated free-for-all.
However, let’s remember the origin of internet. Back in the 1960s, the US Army was thinking about how to maintain communications among surviving units in the event that a global nuclear war destroyed central command. Eventually, the idea emerged of laterally connecting these dispersed units, bypassing the (destroyed) center.
Thus, from the very beginning, the internet contained a democratic potential since it allowed multiple direct exchanges between individual units, bypassing central control and coordination – and this inherent feature presented a threat for those in power. As a result, their principle reaction was to control the digital “clouds” that mediate communication between individuals.
“Clouds” in all their forms are, of course, presented to us as facilitators of our freedom. After all, they make it possible for me to sit in front of my PC and freely surf with everything out there at our disposal – or so it seems on the surface. Nevertheless, those who control the clouds also control the limits of our freedom.
Hiding the remote
The most direct form of this control is, of course, direct exclusion: individuals and also entire news organizations (TeleSUR, RT, Al Jazeera etc.) can disappear from social media (or their accessibility is limited – try to get Al Jazeera on the TV screen in a US hotel!) without any reasonable explanation being given – usually pure technicalities are cited.
While in some cases (for instance, direct racist excesses) censorship is justified, it’s dangerous when it just happens in a non-transparent way. Because the minimal democratic demand that should apply here is that such censorship be done in a transparent way, with public justification. These justifications can also be ambiguous, of course, concealing the true reasons.
In Russia, you may be sent to jail for publishing things on the internet of which you actually strongly disapprove. The latest example is of Eugenia Chudnovets, a kindergarten teacher in Ekaterinburg, who was sentenced to five months in a penal colony for reposting a video showing a child being abused in a summer camp. On March 6, 2017, the conviction was overturned. Chudnovets had been convicted under an article prohibiting the “spreading, publicly demonstrating or advertising of data or items containing sexually explicit images of underage children,” as she had reposted a video on a social network, showing a naked kid being abused in a children’s camp in the town on Kataisk in Kurgan Region. The teacher herself explained that she could not let the flagrant incident go unnoticed – and she was right. Because it seems clear that the true reason for her conviction was not to prevent sexually explicit images of children, but to cover up the abuse going on in public institutions that is tolerated by the state.
Historical memory
However, we cannot dismiss this case as something that can only happen in oppressive Putin’s Russia – we find exactly the same rationale in the first well-known case of such social media censorship, which occurred back in September 2016 when Facebook decided to remove the historical photograph of nine-year-old Kim Phuc running away from a napalm attack. Days later, following a public outcry, the image was reinstated.
Looking back, it’s interesting to note how Facebook defended its decision to remove the image: “While we recognize that this photo is iconic, it’s difficult to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others.” The strategy is clear: the general neutral moral principle (no nude children) is evoked to censor a historical reminder of the horrors of napalm bombing in Vietnam. Brought to extreme, this reasoning could be also used to justify the prohibition of the films that were shot immediately after the liberation of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps.
And, incidentally, a similar thing happened to me repeatedly two years ago when, in my conferences, I described the strange case of Bradley Barton from Ontario, Canada, who, in March 2015, was found not guilty of the first-degree murder of Cindy Gladue, an indigenous sex worker who bled to death at the Yellowhead Inn in Edmonton, having sustained an 11cm wound on her vaginal wall. The defense argued that Barton accidentally caused Gladue’s death during rough but consensual sex, and the court agreed.
Yet, this case doesn’t just counteract our basic ethic intuitions – a man brutally murders a woman during sexual activity, but he walks free because “he didn’t mean it.” Rather, the most disturbing aspect of the case is that, conceding to the demand of the defense, the judge allowed Gladue’s preserved pelvis to be admitted as evidence. It was brought into court, the lower part of her torso was displayed for the jurors (incidentally, this is the first time a portion of a body was presented at a trial in Canada). Why would hard-copy photos of the wound not be enough?
Speak no evil
But my point here is that I was repeatedly attacked for my report on this case: the reproach was that by describing the case I reproduced it and thus repeated it symbolically. Although, I shared it with strong disapproval, I allegedly secretly enabled my listeners to find perverse pleasure in it.
And these attacks on me exemplify nicely the “politically correct” need to protect people from traumatic or disturbing news and images. My counterpoint to it is that, in order to fight such crimes, one has to present them in all their horror, and one has to be shocked by them.
In another era, in his preface to ‘Animal Farm,’ George Orwell wrote that if liberty means anything, it means “the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” – THIS is the liberty that we are deprived of when our media are censored and regulated.
We are caught in the progressive digitalization of our lives: most of our activities (and passivity) are now registered in some digital cloud that also permanently evaluates us, tracing not only our acts but also our emotional states. When we experience ourselves as free to the utmost (surfing the web where everything is available), we are totally “externalized” and subtly manipulated.
So, the digital network gives new meaning to the old slogan “personal is political.” And it’s not only the control of our intimate lives that is at stake: everything today is regulated by some digital network, from transport to health, from electricity to water.
And this is why the web is our most important commons today, and the struggle for its control is THE struggle of our time. And the enemy is the combination of privatized and state-controlled entities, corporations (such as Google and Facebook) and state security agencies (for example, the NSA).
The digital network that sustains the functioning of our societies, as well as their control mechanisms, is the ultimate figure of the technical grid that sustains power, and that’s why regaining control over it is our first task.
WikiLeaks was just the beginning, and our motto here should be a Maoist one: Let a hundred WikiLeaks blossom.
Slavoj Žižek is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London.
Reuters journalists Wa Lone (L) and Kyaw Soe Oo, who are based in Myanmar, pose for a picture at the Reuters office in Yangon, Myanmar December 11, 2017. REUTERS/Antoni Slodkowski/Files
AUGUST 26, 2018
YANGON (Reuters) - A court in Myanmar is set to hand down verdicts on Monday in the case of two Reuters journalists accused of obtaining secret state documents.
Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, are charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act, which carries a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.
The court in Yangon has been holding hearings since January. The reporters and one police witness for the prosecution have testified that they were set up by police to block or punish them for their reporting of a mass killing of Rohingya Muslims.
The verdict will be delivered amid growing pressure on Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her government over an army crackdown that began last August. Around 700,000 Rohingya have since fled the western state of Rakhine to neighbouring Bangladesh, according to United Nations agencies.
Soldiers are accused of mass killings, rape, and arson in a campaign the U.N. has called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
Myanmar denies most of the allegations, but has acknowledged the killing of 10 Rohingya men and boys by troops and Buddhist civilians in the village of Inn Din that the two Reuters reporters had been investigating when they were arrested.
During eight months of hearings, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have testified that two policemen they had not met before handed them papers rolled up inside a newspaper during a meeting at a Yangon restaurant on Dec. 12. Almost immediately afterwards, they said, they were bundled into a car by plainclothes officers.
In April, Police Captain Moe Yan Naing testified that a senior officer had ordered his subordinates to plant secret documents on Wa Lone to “trap” the reporter.
Detained Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo sit beside police officers as they leave Insein court in Yangon, Myanmar July 9, 2018. REUTERS/Ann Wang/Files
Other police witnesses have told court the reporters were searched at a routine traffic stop by officers who were unaware they were journalists and found to be holding secret documents from an unknown source.
The verdict is due on the same day that a U.N mandated fact-finding mission will release its report on the Rohingya crisis. On Tuesday, the United Nations Security Council will hold a briefing on Myanmar in New York.
Bad news for those who enjoy what they think is a healthy glass of wine a day.
A large new global study published in the Lancet has confirmed previous research which has shown that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.
The researchers admit moderate drinking may protect against heart disease but found that the risk of cancer and other diseases outweighs these protections.
A study author said its findings were the most significant to date because of the range of factors considered.
How risky is moderate drinking?
The Global Burden of Disease study looked at levels of alcohol use and its health effects in 195 countries, including the UK, between 1990 and 2016.
Analysing data from 15 to 95-year-olds, the researchers compared people who did not drink at all with those who had one alcoholic drink a day.
They found that out of 100,000 non-drinkers, 914 would develop an alcohol-related health problem such as cancer or suffer an injury.
But an extra four people would be affected if they drank one alcoholic drink a day.
For people who had two alcoholic drinks a day, 63 more developed a condition within a year and for those who consumed five drinks every day, there was an increase of 338 people, who developed a health problem.
One of the study authors, Prof Sonia Saxena, a researcher at Imperial College London and a practising GP, said: "One drink a day does represent a small increased risk, but adjust that to the UK population as a whole and it represents a far bigger number, and most people are not drinking just one drink a day."
A glass of red wine a day is not healthy, say researchers
Image copyright
The lead author of the study Dr Max Griswold, at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington, said: "Previous studies have found a protective effect of alcohol on some conditions, but we found that the combined health risks associated with alcohol increases with any amount of alcohol.
"The strong association between alcohol consumption and the risk of cancer, injuries, and infectious diseases offset the protective effects for heart disease in our study.
"Although the health risks associated with alcohol start off being small with one drink a day, they then rise rapidly as people drink more."
In 2016, the government cut the levels of alcohol it recommends for men and women to no more than 14 units a week - equivalent to six pints of average strength beer or seven glasses of wine.
At the time, England's chief medical officer, Prof Dame Sally Davies, noted that any amount of alcohol could increase the risk of cancer.
'Informed risk'
Prof Saxena said the study was the most important study ever conducted on the subject.
She explained: "This study goes further than others by considering a number of factors including alcohol sales, self-reported data on the amount of alcohol drank, abstinence, tourism data and the levels of illicit trade and home brewing."
The study shows that British women drink an average of three drinks a day, and rank eighth in the world of highest drinkers.
British men by contrast, ranked 62nd out of the 195 countries surveyed, even though they also drink on average three alcoholic drinks a day. This is because the drinking levels were far higher generally among men, with Romanian men drinking more than eight drinks daily.
A drink was defined as 10g of alcohol, which equates to a small glass of wine, a can or bottle of beer, or a shot of spirits. In the UK one unit is 8g of alcohol. Around the world, one in three people are thought to drink alcohol and it is linked to nearly a tenth of all deaths in those aged 15 to 49.
Prof Saxena said: "Most of us in the UK drink well in excess of safe limits, and as this study shows there is no safe limit. The recommendations need to come down further and the government needs to rethink its policy. If you are going to drink, educate yourself about the risks, and take an informed risk."
Yet Prof David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, sounded a note of caution about the findings.
"Given the pleasure presumably associated with moderate drinking, claiming there is no 'safe' level does not seem an argument for abstention," he said.
"There is no safe level of driving, but the government does not recommend that people avoid driving.
"Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention."
A population of about 82,000 people representing 24,100 families in the Kilinochchi District have been affected by the drought prevailing in the area.
A senior official of the District Disaster Management Centre said the people of Kilinochchi, Kandawalai. Pachilipalai, Karachchi and Poonaryn divisions were the worst affected. He said all garden wells had run dry creating hardships for the people for want of drinking water.
Meanwhile farmers pointed out that all tanks and canals in Kilinochchi, Dharmapuram, Puliyanpokkanai and Kallaru areas had run dry and the cattle and other animals were dying as a result. They said the wild elephant roaming into the villages in search of water were destroying paddyfields and home garden crops. The farmers said their cultivations would be ruined and crop failure would result in a severe shortage of paddy if the drought continued.
Official said steps were being taken to provide a skeleton supply of drinking water to the affected areas. (Romesh Madushanka)
August 23, 2018
Scott Morrison remains an intriguing, and polarising, figure on the Liberal Party front-bench. Morrison has been described as relentless, ambitious, and hard-line, although these labels only give us some clues to his personal politics, and ultimately his political agenda.
